back online again

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

Well, I'm back online again at long last.  Actually, I've had  
connectivity back for a few days, but I was so busy trying to get my  
system set up that I've not had a chance to do anything much until  
today.  Dell finally delivered my new machine on Wednesday ... about  
a month later than I was originally expecting/hoping, but it turned  
out not to have a decent RAID card and the Debian AND64 Sarge I had  
been intending to install on it didn't have drivers for the SATA  
disks in it ... so it took me a few days even to get a system up and  
running with a reasonably reliable config (software RAID mirroring of  
two disks with Debian Etch and XP on the third disk for windows  
development).

Anyway, I now have three basic installations of the current GNUstep  
from CVS installed...

1 on windows
1 on debian in a 32bit chroot environment
1 on debian in native 64bit environment

The 64bit gnustep version doesn't work ... problems with invocations/ 
distributed objects.  Has anyone else had any success with 64bit  
operation on this architecture (it's actually an intel emt64, but I  
think that's pretty identical to amd64)?

I suspect there are also a few other issues in the base library with  
respect to 64bit operation, as I think that when I originally went  
through the base library trying to make it 64bit-clean some years  
ago, I was assuming that sizeof(void*) == sizeof(long) as that was  
the case on all 64bit platforms I had seen ... and the amd64 keeps  
sizeof(long) == sizeof(int) == 4 rather than making a long be a 64bit  
integer.

I'd like to get GNUstep working properly in the 64bit environment ...  
it seems to be considerably faster than the 32bit environment on the  
same machine (I had expected it to be about 20% faster but it seemed  
more like double the speed when I was compiling).